Urban mobility models are essential tools for understanding and forecasting how people and goods move within cities, which is vital for transportation planning. The spatial scale at which urban mobility is analysed is a crucial determinant of the insights gained from any model as it can affect models' performance. It is, therefore, important that urban mobility models should be assessed at appropriate spatial scales to reflect the underlying dynamics. In this study, we systematically evaluate the performance of three popular urban mobility models, namely gravity, radiation, and visitation models across spatial scales. The results show that while the visitation model consistently performs better than its gravity and radiation counterparts, their performance does not differ much when being assessed at some appropriate spatial scale common to all of them. Interestingly, at scales where all models perform badly, the visitation model suffers the most. Furthermore, results based on the conventional admin boundary may not perform so well as compared to distance-based clustering. The cross examination of urban mobility models across spatial scales also reveals the spatial organisation of the urban structure.
Calvin Ming Tsun Lai, Alistair Cole, Dionysios Stivas
This paper examines the role of focus groups in mixed-methods research, focusing on trust dynamics within the smart city. It takes the Asian metropolis of Hong Kong as its empirical case. It successfully validates focus groups as a research method across three dimensions. Firstly, focus groups facilitate the comparison of in-depth discussions across various demographic groups; secondly, focus groups enable collective deliberation to uncover hidden relationships; and, thirdly, when correctly employed, focus groups can bridge qualitative (interviews) and quantitative (surveys) research to enhance triangulation. In this study, the findings of focus groups substantiate the data trust paradox identified in previous surveys and interviews: high public support for technology in a low-trust environment, with explicit privacy concerns related to data management. The focus group results reinforce distinct insights in relation to birth origins and political identities, reconfirming differential trust among demographic groups. This paper demonstrates tailored focus groups as an effective approach to unraveling the trust dynamics in smart city strategies.
Deividson Sá Fernandes de Souza, Simone Sehnem, Patricia Guarnieri
et al.
Purpose – This paper aims to provide a comprehensive literature review on the practices and challenges in managing waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) in smart cities. Design/methodology/approach – A systematic literature review was conducted using the Methodi Ordinatio. Articles published between 2012 and 2022 were analyzed, totaling 149 references, of which 30 were included in the final review. Findings – Emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and artificial intelligence (AI) are frequently highlighted as promising solutions for efficient e-waste management. Governance models and public policies are widely recognized as crucial for the successful implementation of WEEE management practices in smart cities. Originality/value – This study underscores the role of advanced technologies, such as IoT and AI, in enhancing urban mobility and WEEE management. Key challenges include information security, privacy, interoperability, costs and sustainability. The findings reveal a convergence between smart cities and WEEE management, fostering the circular economy and the recovery of valuable materials.
Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology, Cities. Urban geography
D. Demenev, E. K. Podobreeva, D. D. Hismatullina
et al.
To this day, the problem of loneliness and social isolation in urban environments has become particularly acute in the context of changing lifestyles, digitalization, and the loss of traditional forms of neighborhood communication. Urbanization, digitalization, uniform development, and a lack of quality public spaces significantly reduce opportunities for establishing and maintaining social connections. In this regard, the subject of research is the influence of architecture on the level of loneliness and social isolation. The aim of this article is to analyze the relationship between the architectural environment and social isolation, followed by the development of recommendations for designing inclusive urban spaces. Considering architecture as a factor in social interactions, special attention is paid to the balance between private and public spaces, as well as the principles of inclusive design. The research methodology is based on the sequential application of elements of the historical approach, historical and art criticism analysis, hermeneutic method, comparative analysis methods, theoretical synthesis, case method (analysis of specific architectural solutions and urban planning practices), as well as visual analysis of certain public spaces and design solutions that influence social engagement. The novelty of the research lies in the author's approach, through which: 1) architecture is considered a socio-existential tool that affects the quality of human interactions in the urban environment; 2) definitions of "loneliness" and "social isolation" are provided; 3) the understanding of the interdisciplinary nature of architecture is generalized and expanded, connecting philosophical, sociological, art criticism, and design approaches to the urban environment. The theoretical foundation of the article can be used for further research in the field of social urbanism. The practical significance of the research lies in the proposed author's recommendations, which can be applied in the development of urban environment projects, residential complexes, and public spaces, as well as in educational activities for training specialists in the field of architecture and urban planning. It is noted that the spatial solutions made today define not only the visual appearance of the environment but also the quality of life, the degree of participation, solidarity, and the sense of belonging of individuals to society. Since architecture significantly influences the formation of the socio-spatial fabric of the city, it should account for the needs of all population groups in the future, ensuring accessibility, safety, and variability of space usage.
The socio-political climate in the UK, compounded by government austerity measures, has intensified the cost-of-living crisis, significantly impacting the affordability of the food supply chain. This has led to an increasing disconnect from healthy dietary practices and has contributed to declines in mental and physical wellbeing. This paper examines the role of edible city (EC) initiatives in addressing these challenges by enhancing food security, fostering social resilience and supporting community wellbeing. The aim of this research is to understand the tangible links between EC mechanisms and how they align with local, cultural and geographical perspectives. Focusing on the City of Lincoln, UK, this study aims to develop a contextualised EC framework that is culturally and geographically relevant and aligns with global goals for sustainable urban development as outlined in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11), promoting inclusive, environmentally safe and economically viable communities. Utilising a mixed methods approach, this research combines qualitative interviews and a critical cross-case analysis of four community growing groups in the UK, alongside quantitative socio-demographic data analysis. The findings reveal that successful EC initiatives adapt to their environment and socio-cultural conditions and highlight the importance of EC diversification for long-term sustainability. Four core themes emerged across the case studies: (1) social prescribing, (2) social capital (3) knowledge sharing and (4) social value. These findings inform the creation of a novel flexible EC framework, Lincoln, providing actionable insights and policy recommendations to support sustainable urban regeneration and enhance community resilience. This research contributes transferable knowledge to inform EC strategies across diverse global urban contexts, promoting a pathway toward resilient and socially cohesive urban environments.
In the literature, there is a simultaneous discourse on urban growth and its consequences (Domingo et al., 2021; Rentschler et al., 2023) and on urban shrinkage (Jarzebski et al., 2021; Khavarian-Garmsir, 2023). The primary purpose of creating this figure is to examine how these two processes appear in Europe based on data from 2011 to 2022 and whether there are differences between European countries.
Abstract Developing sustainable urban systems is a fundamental societal challenge for the 21st century, and central Texas faces particularly synergistic challenges of a rapidly growing urban population and a projected increasingly drought-prone climate. To assess the history of urbanization impacts on watersheds here, we analyzed 51 cores from bald cypress trees in paired urban and rural watersheds in Austin, Texas. We find a significant contrast between rural and urbanized watersheds. In the rural watershed, tree-ring-width growth histories (“chronologies”) from 1844–2018 significantly and positively correlate (p < 0.01) with (1) one another, and (2) regional instrumental and proxy records of drought. In the urbanized watershed, by contrast, chronologies weakly correlate with one another, with instrumental records of drought, and with the rural chronologies and regional records. Relatively weak drought limitations to urban tree growth are consistent with the significant present-day transfer of municipal water from urban infrastructure by leakage and irrigation to the natural hydrologic system. We infer a significant, long-term contribution from infrastructure to baseflow in urbanized watersheds. In contrast to the common negative impacts of ‘urban stream syndrome’, such sustained baseflow in watersheds with impaired or failing infrastructure may be an unintended positive consequence for stream ecosystems, as a mitigation against projected extended 21st-century droughts. Additionally, riparian trees may serve as a proxy for past impacts of urbanization on natural streams, which may inform sustainable urban development.
This article examines the use of the Hangul image in the works of contemporary South Korean artists as a key element of South Korea’s cultural identity and self-definition. Created in the fifteenth century by King Sejong, Hangul has become an important symbol of the independence of Korean culture from Japanese culture and an element of Korean writing to facilitate literacy. In this way, Hangul played a key role in mass enlightenment by making knowledge accessible, connecting different segments of society, and serving as an important tool in the dissemination of culture and education. In today’s context of globalization and digitalization, artists are increasingly turning to the Korean alphabet, using it in their installations using digital technology and multimedia formats, allowing them not only to preserve cultural heritage but also to reinterpret it through the lens of the digital age. Through such works, Hangul acquires new forms of expression, becoming not just a writing, but also a significant visual and philosophical symbol. Examples of exhibitions and installations, such as those at the National Hangul Museum and the Gangseong Museum, demonstrate not only the significance of Hangul in preserving cultural heritage, but also its role as a bridge between tradition and innovation, confirming its relevance in contemporary society and its significance to Korean national identity. For example, an exhibition at the National Museum of Hangul (Seoul, 2017) focused on Hongminjonim, a treatise explaining the principles of the creation and use of the alphabet. Visual and sound elements created a unique space where the traditional Korean alphabet was perceived through a contemporary lens. Kang Ik Joon’s installation Gwanghwamun Ariran (2020), incorporating elements of digital technology, expresses political and cultural ideas, the pursuit of unity, and the preservation of memory. Kang Ik Joon through his installation “Hangul Wall” (2024) interprets the Korean alphabet into contemporary art without losing its meaning. Through the image of Hangul, the artists lay down a powerful visual image that does not leave their compatriot indifferent. In the context of globalization and technological change, Hangul retains its uniqueness as an important tool for expressing Korean identity and cultural memory. As a stimulus for creative processes, Hangul continues to inspire artists, creating a new space for self-expression.
Sociology (General), Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Researchers face the trade-off between publishing mobility data along with their papers while simultaneously protecting the privacy of the individuals. In addition to the fundamental anonymization process, other techniques, such as spatial discretization and, in certain cases, location concealing or complete removal, are applied to achieve these dual objectives. The primary research question is whether concealing the observation area is an adequate form of protection or whether human mobility patterns in urban areas are inherently revealing of location. The characteristics of the mobility data, such as the number of activity records or the number of unique users in a given spatial unit, reveal the silhouette of the urban landscape, which can be used to infer the identity of the city in question. It was demonstrated that even without disclosing the exact location, the patterns of human mobility can still reveal the urban area from which the data was collected. The presented locating method was tested on other cities using different open data sets and against coarser spatial discretization units. While publishing mobility data is essential for research, it was demonstrated that concealing the observation area is insufficient to prevent the identification of the urban area. Furthermore, using larger discretization units alone is an ineffective solution to the problem of the observation area re-identification. Instead of obscuring the observation area, noise should be added to the trajectories to prevent user identification.
The analysis of urban seismic signals offers valuable insights into urban environments and society. Yet, accurate detection and localization of seismic sources on a city-wide scale with conventional seismographic network is unavailable due to the prohibitive costs of ultra-dense seismic arrays required for imaging high-frequency anthropogenic sources. Here, we leverage existing fiber-optic networks as a distributed acoustic sensing system to accurately locate urban seismic sources and estimate how their intensity varies over time. By repurposing a 50-kilometer telecommunication fiber into an ultra-dense seismic array, we generate spatiotemporal maps of seismic source power (SSP) across San Jose, California. Our approach overcomes the proximity limitations of urban seismic sensing, enabling accurate localization of remote seismic sources generated by urban activities, such as traffic, construction, and school operations. We also show strong correlations between SSP values and environmental noise levels, as well as various persistent urban features, including land use patterns and demographics.
Car-dominated daily travel has caused many severe and urgent urban problems across the world, and such travel patterns have been found to be related to the built environment. However, few existing studies have uncovered the nonlinear relationship between the built environment and car dependency using a machine learning method, thus failing to provide policymakers with nuanced evidence-based guidance on reducing car dependency. Using data from Puget Sound regional household travel surveys, this study analyzes the complicated relationship between car dependency and the built environment using the gradient boost decision tree method. The results show that people living in high-density areas are less likely to rely on private cars than those living in low-density neighborhoods. Both threshold and nonlinear effects are observed in the relationships between the built environment and car dependency. Increasing road density promotes car usage when the road density is below 6 km/km2. However, the positive association between road density and car use is not observed in areas with high road density. Increasing pedestrian-oriented road density decreases the likelihood of using cars as the main mode. Such a negative effect is most effective when the pedestrian-oriented road density is over 14.5 km/km2. More diverse land use also discourages people’s car use, probably because those areas are more likely to promote active modes. Destination accessibility has an overall negative effect and a significant threshold effect on car dependency. These findings can help urban planners formulate tailored land-use interventions to reduce car dependency.
Urban land use structures impact local climate conditions of metropolitan areas. To shed light on the mechanism of local climate wrt. urban land use, we present a novel, data-driven deep learning architecture and pipeline, DeepLCZChange, to correlate airborne LiDAR data statistics with the Landsat 8 satellite's surface temperature product. A proof-of-concept numerical experiment utilizes corresponding remote sensing data for the city of New York to verify the cooling effect of urban forests.
Modern sociological studies of Protestantism are focused mainly on how communities are formed and de-velop in the context of their relations with the state and between themselves, personal stories of the believers, and contents and forms of conducting religious practices. Researchers often neglect to describe the numbers and demographic characteristics of practicing believers, and to analyze changes of these parameters over time. In this paper, based on the materials of the field research conducted in Tyumen, Tobolsk, Ishim, and Yalutorovsk in 2014–2016, we identify the locations, demographic composition, and size dynamics of the Protestant prayer meetings. The paper showcases new data on Tyumen accounting for the associations which appeared after 2011 and for the first time presents materials on Tobolsk, Ishim, and Yalutorovsk. Non-participant structured observa-tion was the principal method of the field research. Analysis of photographic documents posted on the web-sites and web-pages of the Protestant associations, as well as interviews with religious specialists were used as addi-tional methods. We observed that there was an increase in the number of Protestant associations from 2008 to 2016: the number of the associations in Tyumen increased by five and about five new communes appeared in the other cities. The most attended weekly prayer meetings were recorded in Tyumen in 2016. They gathered up to 200 people. The largest services in Ishim and Yalutorovsk in 2015 were attended by up to 70 people. The com-munal prayers in Tobolsk in 2014 were attended by up to 170 people. We have identified the following factors that influence the size of the prayer meetings: ownership of the premises by the association and the period of its activ-ity in the region. Communes who have their own premises are larger than those renting an office or a building of another Protestant association. Also, churches formed in the early or mid-1990s feature the largest numbers of the parishioners. It was found that in all studied cities middle-aged women represent the largest group of the pa-rishioners, which is consistent with the results of research in other Russian cities and towns.
En este artículo plantearemos una aproximación a los sistemas de enseñanza en Arquitectura, comprendiendo que históricamente se desarrollaron desde un dispositivo pensado como Maestro-Discípulo, a partir del cual, el maestro dentro de un proceso formativo no necesariamente académico, introduce al discípulo en el conocimiento y oficio de, en este caso, la Arquitectura. Analizaremos cómo operan los sistemas de transposición didáctica, practicum y aprender-haciendo, comprendiendo que estos modos de aproximación desde la experiencia hacia la construcción del conocimiento, definidos por el maestro, condicionan el proceso proyectual del discípulo, manifestando una consolidación y reproducción del dispositivo Maestro-Discípulo.
Architecture, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Massimiliano Luca, Gian Maria Campedelli, Simone Centellegher
et al.
Urban agglomerations are constantly and rapidly evolving ecosystems, with globalization and increasing urbanization posing new challenges in sustainable urban development well summarized in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The advent of the digital age generated by modern alternative data sources provides new tools to tackle these challenges with spatio-temporal scales that were previously unavailable with census statistics. In this review, we present how new digital data sources are employed to provide data-driven insights to study and track (i) urban crime and public safety; (ii) socioeconomic inequalities and segregation; and (iii) public health, with a particular focus on the city scale.
Urban density, in the form of residents' and visitors' concentration, is long considered to foster diverse exchanges of interpersonal knowledge and skills, which are intrinsic to sustainable human settlements. However, with current urban studies primarily devoted to city and district-level analysis, we cannot unveil the elemental connection between urban density and diversity. Here we use an anonymized and privacy-enhanced mobile data set of 0.5 million opted-in users from three metropolitan areas in the U.S to show that at the scale of urban streets, density is not the only path to diversity. We represent the diversity of each street with the Experienced Social Mixing (ESM), which describes the chances of people meeting diverse income groups throughout their daily experience. We conduct multiple experiments and show that the concentration of visitors only explains 26% of street-level ESM. However, adjacent amenities, residential diversity, and income level account for 44% of the ESM. Moreover, using longitudinal business data, we show that streets with an increased number of food businesses have seen an increased ESM from 2016 to 2018. Lastly, although streets with more visitors are more likely to have crime, diverse streets tend to have fewer crimes. These findings suggest that cities can leverage many tools beyond density to curate a diverse and safe street experience for people.
Disparity in spatial accessibility is strongly associated with growing inequalities among urban communities. Since improving levels of accessibility for certain communities can provide them with upward social mobility and address social exclusion and inequalities in cities, it is important to understand the nature and distribution of spatial accessibility among urban communities. To support decision-makers in achieving inclusion and fairness in policy interventions in cities, we present an open-source and data-driven framework to understand the spatial nature of accessibility to infrastructure among the different demographics. We find that accessibility to a wide range of infrastructure in any city (54 cities) converges to a Zipf's law, suggesting that inequalities also appear proportional to growth processes in these cities. Then, assessing spatial inequalities among the socioeconomically clustered urban profiles for 10 of those cities, we find urban communities are distinctly segregated along social and spatial lines. We find low accessibility scores for populations who have a larger share of minorities, earn less, and have a relatively lower number of individuals with a university degree. These findings suggest that the reproducible framework we propose may be instrumental in understanding processes leading to spatial inequalities and in supporting cities to devise targeted measures for addressing inequalities for certain underprivileged communities.
The production of waste as a consequence of human activities is one of the most fundamental challenges facing our society and global ecological systems. Waste generation is rapidly increasing, with corresponding shifts in the structure of our societies where almost all nations are moving from rural agrarian societies to urban and technological ones. However, the connections between these radical societal shifts and waste generation have not yet been described. Here we apply scaling theory to establish a new understanding of waste in urban systems. We identify universal scaling laws of waste generation across diverse urban systems worldwide for three forms of waste: wastewater, municipal solid waste, and greenhouse gasses. We show that wastewater generation scales superlinearly, municipal solid waste scales linearly, and greenhouse gasses scales sublinearly with city size. In specific cases production can be understood in terms of city size coupled with financial and natural resources. For example, wastewater generation can be understood in terms of the increased economic activity of larger cities, and the deviations around the scaling relationship - indicating relative efficiency - depend on GDP per person and local rainfall. We also show how the temporal evolution of these scaling relationships reveals a loss of economies of scale and the general increase in waste production, where sublinear scaling relationships become linear. Our findings suggest general mechanisms controlling waste generation across diverse cities and global urban systems. Our approach offers a systematic approach to uncover these underlying mechanisms that might be key to reducing waste and pursing a more sustainable future.
When forming industrial and economic relations, there is a need for purposeful planning and development of urban agglomerations. The most urgent problem of spatial development of regions is due to the existing differences in the standard of living, conditions, as well as the scheme of the street and road network, namely, peripheral points. An important role in ensuring a high level of development of all the territories of the region is played by "group" forms of highly concentrated settlement, such as urban agglomerations. The development of urban agglomeration makes it possible to distribute industrial production, as well as rationally arrange them in relation to residential development, which will further improve economic and environmental indicators in large cities. In addition, an urban agglomeration that has significantly more opportunities for development is an environment that has properties favorable for inertial processes [6]. The article discusses the features of the formation of the urban agglomeration of the city of Belgorod. The territorial and functional structure of the urban agglomeration is presented. Priorities for the development of the urban agglomeration are outlined. The influence of the agglomeration effect on the economic growth of the region is revealed.